Devopsdays Chicago 2020

Posted on Monday, Nov 9, 2020
DevOpsDays Chicago 2020 was the first time the long-running conference went virtual. A panel of speakers and organizers discuss the event, how it was produced, and what the experience was like!

Guests

Kevin Reedy

Kevin Reedy

Kevin Reedy is an infrastructure developer from Chicago that currently works for Kong (not the dog toy company) as a Senior Technical Account Manager. In his free time, he enjoys playing shuffleboard (the kind you’d find on the deck of cruise ship), brewing beer, snowboarding, and promising that he’ll update his blog more often.

Sasha Rosenbaum

Sasha Rosenbaum

Sasha is a Product Manager at GitHub, focused on helping engineers be successful with using GitHub for work as well as for open source.

In her career, Sasha has worked in development, operations, consulting, and cloud architecture. Sasha is an organizer of DevOpsDays Chicago, a chair of DeliveryConf, and a published author.

Jason Yee

Jason Yee

Jason Yee is Director of Advocacy at Gremlin where he helps people build more resilient systems by learning from how they fail. He also leads the internal Chaos Engineering practices to make Gremlin more reliable. Previously, he worked at Datadog, O’Reilly Media, and MongoDB. His pandemic-coping activities include drinking whiskey, cooking everything in a waffle iron, and making chocolate.

Kat Cosgrove

Kat Cosgrove

Kat Cosgrove is a chronic early-adopter of new technologies and a real-life cyborg. Her professional engineering background is in web development, IoT, and programming education, but today she’s a Developer Advocate for JFrog. She loves finding creative solutions for hard problems, especially if they’re a little hacky.

When she’s not building demos or at a conference, she spends her time gaming, watching e-sports, and working on useless but entertaining side-projects. She also volunteers with area non-profits geared towards getting more women and other underrepresented minorities into tech.

Laura Santamaria

Laura Santamaria

As LogDNA’s Developer Advocate, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work. She bridges the gap between external developers and SREs and internal engineering teams. Apart from work, she co-hosts Austin DevOps, taught Python for Women Who Code Austin for many years, and volunteers with DevOpsDays Austin. Outside of tech, Laura runs, plays with her dogs, throws discs, and watches clouds—the real kind

Chris Read

Chris Read

I help developers understand the environments they are developing for, and help infrastructure people build better systems for the software they run. Occasional speaker, Bare Metal DevOps Advocate, DevOpsDays Chicago Organizer.

Hosts

Matt Stratton

Matt Stratton (he/him)

Matty Stratton is the Director of Developer Relations at Aiven, a well-known member of the DevOps community, and a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.

Matty has over 20 years of experience in IT operations and is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering focused events worldwide. Demonstrating his keen insight into the changing landscape of technology, he recently changed his license plate from DEVOPS to KUBECTL.

He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, whom he loves just a little bit more than he loves Diet Coke.

Trevor Hess

Trevor Hess

Trevor Hess is a Senior Product Manager at Progress Software working on Chef Software. He currently works on the Chef Application Delivery, Compliance and Infrastructure offerings.

Coming from a background in .NET Software Development and consulting, he has worked with several large multinational organizations to help kick start their journey to the cloud and the world of DevOps practices and principals. He is excited to engage in new experiences, and learning opportunities.

Trevor enjoys having hearty discussions about DevOps as well organizational change and transformation.


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